Your Two Weeks Are Up

The Inevitability of Populist Vulgarity.

An image caught my eye as I watched Trump’s tawdry White House transaction, shifting the headquarters of the Space Force from Colorado to Alabama. It was the door to the Oval Office. I’ve been through that holy portal several times and it is an intimidating place, not quite understated—it shimmers with history—but certainly not overstated, either. Its importance was always inherent. It was a reflection of sober American power, no need to be flashy. But now, Trump—unable to understand the quiet aesthetic and unmistakable political message of the room—has decided to spruce it up. There is fool’s gilt everywhere. In the ceiling, on the doors, tacky, obvious…A friend, the excellent writer Michael Daly, once noted that the lobby of Trump Tower looked like a massive pink marble bathroom. Now Trump has turned the Oval Office into a Las Vegas marriage parlor.

The man has no class. I don’t just mean this in classic old-money, new-money terms, although that distinction certainly exists; excess without insight is the very opposite of sophistication. It is slapstick; it is the Marx Brothers’ Freedonia. I’ve met a great many people without money who possessed a naturally aristocratic sense of taste, proportion and grace. This are qualities Donald Trump will never know. There is an aesthetic boorishness to Trump that matches the populist vulgarity of his speech and policy. There is a lack of aesthetic intelligence that signals ignorance (of history, at the very least). It is a form of dilettantism, a naïveté that smart opponents can exploit, though his only smart opponents appear to be overseas at the moment. He still manages to convey strength, but in a damaged, offensive way. He is weaker than he seems. His policies—at least, the substantive ones—are failing. In case you missed it, the most recent “two weeks” he gave Vladimir Putin to stop the war in Ukraine have expired. Just like the two weeks before that. And the month before that. He seems unable to grok that Putin doesn’t want peace in Ukraine. He wants Ukraine. Trump’s weakness has had one benign result: the Europeans have realized they can no longer exploit the post-World War II American military umbrella. We don’t fear European tribal rancor or German rearmament as we once did. And we should welcome the promise of security guarantees for Ukraine that emerged from the EU Summit this week. We should also join them, arming Ukraine to the teeth and—yes—threatening to include Ukraine in NATO. As it now stands, Trump’s Putin policy is classic wimpery: he’s the bully who can’t deal with a strong opponent. (Russia is incredibly weak, of course; but it has nukes.)

China has real strength, though. It is too strong to be bullied. Trump may have noticed, as American presidents before him did, that the Chinese are very stubborn. Their xenophobia is unmatched on the planet—in part because of strength of numbers and Han Chinese homogeneity, and also because of their memory, still raw, of the racist humiliation visited upon them by the western colonial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. And now, too, because of their economic and technological powers. They are still slip-streamers, making their money by knocking off American innovations; they will never have our creativity. But they have enormous economic and technological power, and they are advantaged by Trump’s energy myopia. He doesn’t “like” windmills? What a jerk. The Chinese are as proud of their country as we are confused by ours. The idea, abroad in this Administration, that we can somehow “defeat” China is anachronistic, at best. We may have to carve a new economic regime with them—after decades of Chinese WTO exploitation—and we may have to stand athwart China’s Taiwan fantasies, but given the nature of the technological era we’re entering, there is no alternative to cooperation. In that sense, the most important piece of journalism this week was certainly Tom Friedman’s plea for a joint Chinese-American effort to set the ground rules for Artificial Intelligence. If you haven’t read it, you should.

This week there was also the spectacle—the mortal dopiness—of Robert Kenndy Jr’s truculent testimony before the Senate. Earlier, he had issued this explanation for firing the not-insane, recently appointed head of the Centers for Disease Control, Susan Menarez, followed by the flight of top members of her staff:

“We are the sickest country in the world. That’s why we have to fire people at the CDC. They did not do their job,” Kennedy later said. “I need to fire some of those people to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”

Here is what you have to believe in order to think we are sickest country in the world: You have to be a severely demented conspiracy theorist. And conspiracies are the fool’s gilt of politics. You have to believe that vaccines kill. You have to believe food additives cause autism. Now, I will concede: all vaccines produce a minuscule number of random deaths, but they save more lives by orders of magnitude. And yes, I too am puzzled by the rise of autism—as is almost everyone else. But in Bobby Kennedy’s idiot world, we are not allowed to be puzzled. There have to be obvious answers to everything.

That is Donald Trump’s world. That is why the two nepo babies get along. There is an answer for everything. He alone can save us. The notion of complexity is blithely alien to his simple sensibility. Unfortunately, that’s not how life works. Some problems—most big problems—don’t have easy answers. They have to be studied, and tested, acts of patience Trump seems unable to muster. Eventually, his populist vulgarity—his insistence on simplicity—hits the cement guardrail of reality. That may be happening now. The vast majority of Americans disagree with him on vaccines. The vast majority of Americans disagree with him on gun control. They even disagree with him on accepting illegal immigrants who work hard and abide the law. And just wait until the toll of his tariff fantasies take their economic pound of flesh. And then, and then…

Not much will happen. Even if he is underwater on matters of policy substance, Trump bobs along on the buoyancy of his cultural intelligence. The Democrats, as David Brooks writes today, are immune to the reality that culture counts more than economics. They are ostriching the cultural issues, but the stolid heft of traditional culture is not going away. The clever tweets of Gavin Newsom are entertaining—and, one hopes, annoying to Trump—but there is no there there. There is no strategy, just barely a tactic. Trump, a chronic imposter, found his strength on crime and immigration. The Democrats should be able to do that, too. Why haven’t they challenged Trump with a detailed immigration plan? Why haven’t they offered the obvious alternative to Trump’s National Guard deployments—a plan to put more cops (100,000 is a nice round number) on the streets with guidelines about how to train them?

I’ve been doing this for more than 50 years and I’ve not seen a party as paralyzed and clueless as the current Dems. They wreak of weakness and desperation—and they are unable to say the most basic things: two parents are better than one, boys are different from girls, there should not be racial preferences, distinctions countries have borders, crime is evil, some late-term abortions are indeed murder. Absent a clarion statement of those values, a majority of Americans will take populist vulgarity any time. The Dems can stew in their “enlightened” positions. Sophistication without sense or context is dilettantism.